The Man Who Cast Two Shadows Read online

  The best of the death photos was centered on the board. The damage to the skin of her face he overlaid with a memory of the photo Riker had shown him when she posed as a living model. He superimposed the rosy live flesh over the white and the dead. When the living image lay over the death mask, it had the unsettling effect of the photographic woman suddenly opening her eyes.

  His mind did a little dance and jog away from reality and then came back to it with caution, tripping all the way, falling now as the wound to the side of her head bled through the double image. He winced at the living expression juxtaposed with the clotted blood. The brown blazer she died in bore the drippings of the wound in a great bloody stain draped over one shoulder.

  She was smiling. That bothered him. He found he could alter the smile to a more appropriate expression and still be true to the likeness. Now her facial arrangement seemed only friendly and slightly inquisitive. What now? it asked. He held this new image of her for too long—so long that it would remain in memory for years.

  He scanned the items of the apartment inventory and found a bottle of her perfume on the list. He found it again in the photograph of her bathroom counter. She wore the scent of roses. The perfume bottle bore the logo of an old and prestigious house. He remembered seeing a bottle of that scent among the sequined costumes and the makeup boxes in the cellar where the illusions of Maximillian Candle were stored.

  Her husband was staring at the computer screen when she walked into the room.

  Pansy Heart came up behind him softly. Noise of any kind irritated him. Over his shoulder she read the words YOU LIAR, YOU LIAR, YOU LIAR. The words filled out the entire screen. She looked up to the slot at the top of the screen, which labeled this file as a personal message.

  He turned on her. His face was red with anger.

  “Don’t you ever sneak up behind me again!”

  She backed away quickly, stilling the hand that rose almost of its own accord when it sensed an oncoming blow. But he only turned his face back to the screen. He pounded on the console and sent the books and papers flying. She knelt on the carpet and began to crawl on all fours, retrieving every fallen thing.

  “Get out of here!” he yelled. “Get out!”

  She backed away from him, still on her knees, then stumbling to a stand, now scurrying off down the hall. As she entered the bedroom, she was met by her own reflection hurrying toward her. She stopped before the full-length mirror and fit her fist into her mouth to keep from crying out loud.

  When had she dropped so much weight?

  With her hair pulled back the way he insisted she wear it, and with the new thinness of her body, and now that expression of a hunted animal, she had come to be a living likeness of Judge Emery Heart’s dead mother.

  The braille printer scrolled out the message, filling sheet after sheet with two damning words.

  Eric Franz sat very still, eyes fixed on a scene inside his head, a horror movie that never ended. A bright snowfall cascaded by the wide front window, large flakes illuminated by the building’s exterior lights. He turned from the window and ripped the scrolling sheets from the printer.

  And now it snowed outside and inside as he created his own small storm of white flakes of paper being torn into ever smaller bits. He worked in the dark.

  His hands were full when he returned to the front room of his apartment. Charles unloaded his small cache on the coffee table. Of the ingredients for making a woman, Riker’s contribution had been half a pack of cigarettes left behind this afternoon. According to the medical examiner’s report on Mallory’s wall, Amanda had been a smoker. There were no cigarettes on Mallory’s meticulous inventory. Amanda might have given up the habit when she knew she was pregnant, but her manuscript was filled with imagery of smoke, matches struck in the dark when she woke alone to hug her knees and rock her body and hold herself in her own arms through the long night into a morning of filled ashtrays and dust motes swirling in the blue smoke and the gray light.

  Cousin Max’s contribution had been the bottle of rose scent from the old wardrobe box in the basement. Old Malakhai’s Louisa had gone everywhere in the scent of gardenias. Amanda Bosch had gone about in roses.

  He called up Amanda’s face on a patch of wall, the eidetic images of life over death, which were fixed in memory.

  Now what was Malakhai’s recipe?

  He should have started with a massive head injury like the one Malakhai had sustained in the Korean conflict. Such a wound was definitely concomitant with all the most bizarre aberrations, such as the stigmata.

  Well, if he had no physical trauma, he certainly had his own injuries to the heart and the mind. And perhaps this was Mallory’s contribution to the unholy stew.

  Next on the list would be the years of Malakhai’s solitary confinement in a Korean prison cell, the terrible isolation he had suffered, emerging finally from that cell with a phantom Louisa.

  Charles reflected on his own years of isolation. A sprawling university campus was as close to the six-foot-square cell as he could come. He thought of his years of being the freak child among the tall students ten years his senior. And then came the years of isolation in the sheltering womb of Effrim Wilde’s think tank before making his escape into real life and his own consulting firm.

  For most of his life, he had been a thing apart, an alien in a culture of socially adept people. All of this would nearly approximate Malakhai’s isolation from the world. But he needn’t go back so far in time. There was the ache of loneliness each time Mallory quit a room.

  Another contribution, thank you, Mallory.

  If anything should happen to Mallory, she could never be reconstructed as Malakhai had done for Louisa, as he would attempt to do for Amanda Bosch. No one had access to Mallory’s thoughts and feelings. Nothing must ever happen to her.

  Oh, fool.

  He had forgotten the music. The concerto had been a prime ingredient in Malakhai’s creation of Louisa. In childhood, it had been the trigger of his own imagination. His copy of the concerto had been worn to shreds. But the music was so much a part of him he had never thought to replace the recording. There was an old 78 vinyl record in the basement somewhere, as well as the old turntable for that period of technology.

  Ah, but wait. If Amanda Bosch was to be a mental construct, perhaps he should practice first with the music. He had only heard the piece a thousand times in his life.

  Now he had all the ingredients of Malakhai’s madness. The music, the scent, and the loneliness.

  Yes, he could manage it.

  He lit one of Riker’s cigarettes and set it to smoking in the ashtray. He concentrated on Amanda’s face, recreating the image he had composed in Mallory’s office, the pictures of life imposed on death. And now the eyes of Amanda Bosch stared into his own. Photographic memory assisted him with every detail of those sad eyes. She had only the flatness of any photograph he could call up, for he was no Malakhai. But even in this poor translation, she was compelling. The eyes communicated much of her, even in the poverty of only two dimensions. Mystery was there, and profound loss.

  And now with an inner ear, he searched for the notes of Louisa’s Concerto.

  He had been a child of seven the first time he heard the work performed as the overture to Malakhai’s performance of magic and the madness of dead Louisa. Cousin Max had taken him to the show as a treat for his birthday.

  He could find many of his own features in his adult cousin, but Max had been a handsome translation: a nose not so great, and eyes with a more normal proportion of white to the colored bits.

  He and Cousin Max had found the way to their seats by the glow of flickering candle footlights. The conductor’s baton was rising as they settled down to the red velvet chairs in the concert hall.

  There had been no gentle beginning to Louisa’s Concerto. The instruments had welled up and rocked him with an explosion of opening chords, and the music rolled over him, powerful and eerie, then calmer, subsiding into echoes of music wi
thin the movement, metaphors of empty corridors. The music rose again to crash down upon him with a passion. And then, at the most unexpected moment, there was a lull, bleeding into an empty silence that caused angst among all the listeners. It was a vacant space which the ear strained to fill with echoes from the refrain which were not heard except in the mind. It was a true vacuum, and the imagination of every independent listener had rushed to fill it with phantom notes to end the terrible, unbearable silence.

  And then, the real music of solid instruments had resumed with an intake of breath which emanated from every quarter of the hall, relief from the audience that they were not lost. The music was back and flooding over them, making them all new again as though they had been cleansed, not by fire, nor by water, but by passage through the void.

  The curtain rose and the music had begun again in accompaniment to the magic act. Malakhai had created Louisa on stage as a real presence. Then he sent her out into the audience, and here and there, a gasp was heard as one person and another imagined that Louisa had touched them. The scent of flowers was everywhere for a time, and then it was gone away into the dark of a child’s imagination.

  And this time, in the void, the magic silence where the listeners placed the phantom notes rather than endure the emptiness, there he had heard a woman screaming.

  Long after the hall emptied of its audience, and only the concerned stage manager remained, Cousin Max had sat in the front row, holding the hand of a badly frightened child.

  Max had once told him the best of music kept to the natural rhythms of the heart. Louisa’s Concerto was such a piece. He had the basic structure of it now, and he strained to find the subtle places where Louisa had placed the most delicate constructions. He sat still for an interval of time which might have been an hour or four, and finally, he had recreated the music, note for note, just as he had heard it that first night so long ago. And in that void Louisa’s genius had created within the music, he recreated the scream, just as he had heard it as a child, but not to the same effect. Now he welcomed the sound of another voice, even a scream, to fill the empty space he had come to recognize as loneliness.

  He lit another cigarette to replace the one whose coal had gone dark. The smoke spiraled and wafted around his face without odor or sting to the eyes. He could only smell the roses.

  Perhaps the perfume had been a mistake. The scent in the small gold bottle retrieved from the basement had the life span of all things with living ingredients. It filled his senses with the tainted aroma of decayed blooms which had died long before young Amanda was born.

  The strains of the concerto were in his mind in vivid detail, interior music, corridors of sadness, and then—Amanda.

  She was only the two dimensions of his called-up photographic image, but there was a palpable energy to the woman before him. Expressive eyes could create that illusion in any number of dimensions.

  Now, in the manner of adding pinches of pepper and dashes of salt, he put liquid and gleam in the soft blue eyes, and he gave her a luster of Mallory’s sun-gold hair which could thieve light from shadow.

  Ready now.

  He leaned forward. “Amanda?”

  The photographic image bowed its head in response. It was more like a sheet of paper bending to force, an awkward attempt at animating the flat image of a dead woman.

  “Why were you killed, Amanda?”

  She responded with Mallory’s voice. He created it for her with only the silk of Mallory and not the sarcasm, only the soft notes for Amanda, and with this voice Amanda said, “He lied to me.”

  Her soft mouth had opened and closed in a succession of jerking photographic images—a poor approximation of life, a bad joke on God.

  There was a wounding to the eyes, as though he had offended her. And he had. His eyes went away from her, and she died off to the side of peripheral vision.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said to no one, for there was no one there, not Amanda certainly, nor even her after-image anymore. What a grotesque puppet show this had been. How pathetic was he.

  He capped the perfume bottle, but the death of killed roses hung in the air. When he passed into the other rooms, it hung in memory, this smell of death. And when he was in his bed and most vulnerable, hands and feet bound by sleep, floating helpless in the dark—Amanda came back.

  All the night long and all about his dreams, fresh young roses were being killed. Even the small, sleeping buds, still closed in tight balls of soft petals—they were also dying.

  4

  DECEMBER 23

  For a full minute, Charles Butler had been standing by the door, listening to the scuffle of shoes in the outer hallway. By the light-footed pacing to and fro, he knew his visitor was a small person. And just now, somewhere between acute hearing and Zen, he detected the sound of someone standing on one leg and then the other. He politely waited until his visitor had resolved the hesitation and the door buzzer sounded.

  Charles opened the door with his smile already in place, a genuine smile, for he liked small children.

  “Hello. So you’ve come early.” A full hour early.

  “Yes,” said Justin Riccalo, rocking on the balls of his feet. “I’m supposed to meet my parents here. My piano lesson was canceled, and I didn’t know where else to go.”

  Not home? Was it possible he wasn’t welcome there?

  As though the boy had read his mind, he said, “I don’t have my own key. I could go somewhere else. I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t apologize. I was just on my way to the basement. I’d be happy to have some company. Do you like magic tricks?”

  Justin’s response was not what he had anticipated. The rocking ceased, as though his store of nervous energy had escaped from a hole which had suddenly deflated the boy. He was a slender child, and if he deflated any more, he would be altogether gone.

  “Do I like tricks? Mr. Butler, is this your subtle way of asking me if I can make a pencil fly?”

  “Not at all. I think you’ll like the basement.”

  With only the lift of one slight shoulder, the boy made it clear that he didn’t care one way or the other.

  Charles locked the office door, and they walked down the long hall toward the exit sign which led to the staircase. The boy looked back over his shoulder to the elevator, and Charles explained that stairs were the only way to the lowest level, and he hoped that Justin didn’t mind the walk. Justin trudged along at Charles’s side, walking as though his legs weighed fifty pounds, each one.

  Apparently, stairs were a novelty for a child raised in a luxury high-rise. When the door opened onto a spiral staircase of black iron, Justin held on to the rail and leaned far over the side. He seemed hypnotized by the winding metal. Bright lights glared at him from bare bulbs at each floor and twisted the shadows of the curling iron.

  “Awesome,” said Justin, approving the tortured shapes of light and shadow. “This is a great old building.”

  “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

  Charles led the way, and the boy followed, reluctant hesitance gone from his steps.

  “So what are we going to do down there, sir? You have some kind of spook meter you want me to stick my finger in?”

  “No, nothing that sophisticated. Usually, I just sit around and talk to the subject. Sometimes we do written tests.”

  “What kind of subjects do you specialize in? UFOs?”

  “Nothing that entertaining. Sorry. In my work, the subject is always a person with a unique gift. I find a way to qualify it, quantify it, and then I find a use for it. Lots of people are overdeveloped in some area of intelligence. Take my partner, Mallory. She has a natural gift for computers.”

  “Computers are only mechanical devices.” Justin’s pronouncement had the peal of middle-aged absolutism. “Anyone with a manual can operate one.”

  “Well, Mallory doesn’t need manuals. She does things the designers never thought of. You would not believe the things she accomplishes at a computer.”

>   Oh, wait. Perhaps Mallory was not such a good role model for a small child.

  “But your partner’s gift already has an application.”

  “Yes. In most cases, I find people with gifts that have no apparent application, and I project the area they’ll do well in. Then I find them a place in a research project. Sounds dull, doesn’t it? But it creates a window for developers of new technology.”

  “All right, Mr. Butler. Do you want to start without my parents?”

  “Oh, no. This excursion is just for the fun of it. I was on my way down here to look for an old record album that belonged to my cousin. He was a magician—Maximillian Candle. Have you ever heard of him? No, you wouldn’t have. It’s been a very long time since he was on the stage. Are you interested in magic? You didn’t say.”

  They had reached the last floor, and Charles was working the lock on the door. Once inside, he felt at the top of the fuse box for the flashlight. He clicked on the beam and motioned for the boy to follow behind him.

  They made their way through a canyon of shadowy boxes and crates, old furniture and picture frames. He trained the flashlight beam through a myriad of draped furniture, ghosts of castaway items, boxes and mazes of trunks and cartons.

  The pleated back wall was a paneled screen which ran the length of the basement. Charles inserted a key into another lock and this wall began to fold back on itself, a gigantic, silent accordion.

  The cavernous space beyond was dimly lit by a wide back window high up on the basement wall. The bars on the window were Mallory’s work, as were the pick-proof locks installed throughout the building. She would have put bars on every window if he had allowed it. It had taken a long time to explain to her that he would rather be burgled than jailed in his own house.

  Now the beam of his flashlight shone on a collage of bright satin and silk gleaming through cellophane wrappers. Sequins and rhinestones sparkled through the dust of garment bags which hung in a wardrobe trunk. A portion of the room was obscured by a large fire-breathing dragon on a tall rice-paper screen. A rack of sturdy shelving lined one wall with satin masks, top hats, a silver dove-load, giant playing cards, ornate boxes and small trunks each containing its own magic.